A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Joe Shuster got half of the rawest deal of the 20th
century -- a few bucks in return for Superman, a character that made
hundreds of millions of dollars for other men (mostly not creators,
mostly not scrupulous, mostly already rich). His story is perfectly
crafted as an object lesson -- the artist who went blind, the creator
thrown away from his own creation, the man who died just a step above
poverty as his images were loved by millions worldwide -- and yet it's
completely true.

Secret Identity wouldn't exist in a juster
world: it collects the art that Shuster created in the early '50s for a
trashy, badly-produced and frankly exploitative magazine called Nights of Horror,
printed to be sold under the counter at a number of newsstands in New
York. It has a lot of characters that look like Kent and Lane and Luthor
and Olsen, because that's how Shuster drew, but these folks are
whipping each other and engaged in other kinds of sadistic and sexual
torments. This book exists because of prurient interest -- the art in
the first place, and its republication in this form after it was
rediscovered by Craig Yoe -- and I read it because of prurient interest,
and, if you're at all intrigued by it, that'll be because of prurient
interest as well. That's a kind of purity, I guess.

Secret Identity has interest primarily in the fact that it exists at all; there may be a few really devoted students of Shuster's line, but there are vastly more whowill pretend to be while reading this book. It's a sad and tawdry symbol of the Original Sin of Comics, set to remind us that the house always wins and the little guy always gets screwed.